Putin’s Endgame

By Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Gerard Roland (UC Berkeley)

There is every evidence that Russian troops are fighting the Ukrainian army on the Ukrainian soil. This Russian invasion is a further escalation of the war between Ukraine and Russian-sponsored separatists and terrorists in the East of Ukraine. As soon as the Ukrainian forces were about to take over cities in Eastern Ukraine, Mr. Putin raised the stakes and sent Russian military to rescue the separatists from certain defeat. Both sides have experienced heavy losses, but the Russian government denies any involvement. The excuses sound increasingly surreal (e.g., Russian paratroopers got lost). Furthermore, dead Russian soldiers appear to be buried in secret and journalists trying to reveal these losses are harassed, intimidated and severely beaten. Finally, Russia shows no sign of being willing to engage in genuine negotiations to establish peace—all previous attempts turned into farce when Russian calls for peace were followed with more Russian weapon deliveries and casualties.

After the cut-off of gas supplies in 2014, the infamous annexation of Crimea earlier this year, the delivery of weapons (including  tanks, artillery and BUKs that shot down Malaysian airline civil airliner MH17) to separatists, and now an invasion in Eastern Ukraine, one may ask where Mr. Putin is going to stop. We believe that Mr. Putin has been making calculated choices all along the way. His objective in Ukraine is to destabilize the new government that emerged from the Euromaidan movement that toppled Yanukovich. The ultimate motivation for this is to consolidate his own power at home and to prevent a similar democratic revolution in Russia. In each step of the Ukrainian conflict, he has weighed the benefits of each move, from the point of view of this strategic objective, against the costs. The current invasion is motivated by the need to prevent a military defeat of the separatists and to keep the conflict in Eastern Ukraine alive.